World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) defines two techniques to set an element position in HTML tables: position and floats. For the position based technique, there are four possible ways to calculate the position of an element in HTML document: static, relative, absolute, and fixed. An element with static position always has the position the normal flow of the page gives it. A static element ignores any top, bottom, left or right declarations. An element with relative position moves an element relative to its normal position, which the page assigns to it. For example “left 20” adds 20 pixels to the LEFT position of the element. An element with absolute position is positioned at the specified coordinates relative to its containing block. The element's position is specified with the “left”, “top”, “right”, and “bottom” properties. An element with fixed position is positioned at the specified coordinates relative to the browser window. The position of the element is specified with the “left”, “top”, “right”, and “bottom” properties. The element remains at that position regardless of scrolling.
A crosstab (abbreviation of cross-tabulation) is a visualization of data that displays the joint distribution of two or more variables simultaneously. Crosstabs are layouts of data in rows, columns, and pages. A dimension is a structure that categorizes data. In analytic workspace, a dimension is a container for a list of values. In a crosstab, dimension members are listed across the first row and down the first column; the data for measures appears in the cells that form the body of the crosstab. A crosstab can be used to display summary information and show how data varies across dimensions, such as sales by region by month. Each cell shows the value associated with the specific combination of row and column headings. Crosstabs are usually presented in a matrix format; hence, a crosstab is sometimes called a matrix.
All four possible ways (values) to calculate the position of an element according to the position based technique described above, when used alone, are insufficient for rendering HTML tables and crosstabs, when crosstab data elements are positioned relative to the top-left corner of the table and not their first container, which is table data (TD). Fixed value positions all data with respect to a browser window and, if there are other tables and elements in the page with fixed property, the data and the other tables and elements overlay each other. Static value positioning does not allow offset values to be applied to data and cannot position data. Relative value positions data with respect to its original position and not top-left corner of the table. Absolute value positions data with its first container/parent, which is table data (TD) and not top-left corner of the table.